“I’m glad that you do. You can only imagine the number of troubled relationships I encounter on a daily basis. It’s a rare pleasure to see the two of you together. It’s the kind of thing I wish I could see just a little more frequently.”
I began to feel a tiny bit uncomfortable. A little bit naked.
“I can understand why you would want to celebrate this love with something very distinctive.” He looked off in the distance and didn’t speak for a very long time. Then his eyes caught mine. “Tell me; is it necessary that you buy this gift for your fiancée today?”
“I was planning to. Why do you ask?”
“As you yourself said, I get new things in here all the time. I have some thoughts about items you might find suitable for this present, but they aren’t here. If you can return in two days, I may be able to offer you something extraordinary.”
Two days? I was planning on giving Melissa her gift that night, though I didn’t have a particularly strong reason for doing so. Considering what Stephon was capable of acquiring, it seemed silly to stick to such a rigid schedule.
“Then I’ll be back in two days,” I said. I smiled and pointed a finger at him playfully. “I’m counting on you to come through for me big time, Stephon.”
Stephon nodded once slowly. “I promise to do my very best. I do have one request of you, though. When you return, answer this question for me: what is the greatest fantasy you have of your future wife?”
I was a little abashed by the question and I’m sure it showed on my face. “You don’t mean….”
Stephon laughed heartily. “No, certainly not. I am anything but a voyeur. I’m talking about a fantasy of the heart. A fantasy of your love. What is your wildest wish for your life with Melissa?”
I smiled. “I’ll have to give that some thought.”
“Give it a great deal of thought.”
I had no idea what he meant by that, but he’d already gotten me thinking. I would, in fact, give this a great deal of consideration – and I really looked forward to seeing what he had for me when I returned.
Chapter 4
This Evening’s Entertainment
I was blinded by the light.
Down went the night setting on my rearview mirror, but my side mirror glowed incandescent white in the glare of high beams. It was an SUV or a pickup, judging by the height of the headlights. My pursuer edged closer until he was within spitting distance of my bumper.
“Ignore him, Ken.” Melissa said. She leaned over from the passenger seat and rubbed my shoulder.
I squinted against the halon light and focused on my speedometer. I had dared to drive forty-five in a forty-mile-per-hour zone, and now some fool who’d had a hard day at the office was taking out his anxiety on me. Or maybe he was somebody who worked on Capitol Hill and truly believed the country was at serious risk if he was late to dinner. Speed limits were for non-essential personnel.
A horn bellowed. I lifted my right hand off the steering and flexed my fingers. Melissa grabbed my hand in a grip surprisingly tight.
“Don’t do it, Ken.”
My mirror faded from white to silver as the SUV surged into the opposing lane and zoomed past me, its driver slowing to give me a middle finger. Same to you, buddy, I muttered silently.
Hadn’t there been a time, though, when I was at least as heavy on the pedal as this guy? When I would have sent my car hurtling down the road, trusting in my skill as a driver and the speed of my airbags? The day I bought my A7 was the day someone’s Hyundai nearly went into a ditch. Speeding made Melissa nervous, though, so I didn’t do that kind of thing anymore. Like so many other things that seemed central to my existence before her, I didn’t miss it in the least, and I’d even come around to seeing things from her perspective.
Spots were just beginning to fade from my eyes when another pair of headlights appeared, closing fast. I saw a little red sign on top and braced myself for a ten-minutes-or-it’s-free banzai charge. This vehicle stayed its distance, though, covering our tail until we turned off the road to the shelter of the street that led to where Melissa’s parents lived.
We were in McLean, home of the CIA and more wealth than most developing nations. It was the sort of place where you could judge the money and importance of people by how far back their homes were from the road. We passed mansions hidden behind trees, their roofs silhouetted against the skyline like castle battlements.
It was Wednesday night, and Wednesdays meant roast beef and potatoes with Mr. and Mrs. Argent. We had a million things to do to prepare for our wedding, but not even the impending marriage of their daughter was going to interfere with the Argents’ Wednesday tradition.
I pulled into a quiet side street that was probably affordable when Melissa’s parents bought their home thirty years ago, before housing prices rocketed and then went stratospheric during the first Internet boom and stayed relatively high through the economic crisis. It was the sort of street every suburban child should grow up on, where the homes were large and the trees plentiful. As we passed a yellow “For Sale” sign, I calculated that our combined incomes could afford us a house here. The neighborhood was getting younger again, as pensioned government officials retreated to the carefully pruned comfort of Florida retirement communities. Where once big, lumbering American sedans called these streets home, shiny BMWs now sat in driveways. Melissa’s parents could make a fortune selling their house and moving to a sunnier clime, but Mrs. Argent said the Marine Corps had moved them enough when they were younger, and that she was determined to stay in the home they’d settled in.
I parked before a white house with rose bushes blooming and tulips standing sentry in parade-ground platoons of yellow, red, and white. Sitting in the driveway was a four-door Ford Taurus, spotless and shiny as the day it was bought. On the back windshield was a sticker emblazoned with the red eagle-and-globe of the Marines.
Though dusk had barely begun, the porch light was on. Melissa’s mother greeted me at the door with a hug that dented my ribs. “Welcome, son-in-law,” she said. Mrs. Argent was a 1950s TV wife come to life. She was a short, cheerful woman with a gray perm, rosy cheeks, and a way of calling me “dear” as warm as a January fireplace. She wore an old-fashioned apron over a red-checked dress. She was a bit of a cliché, an outmoded one at that, yet I liked this woman, housewife exterior and all. She was kind to me from the day Melissa brought me to dinner for the first time. Loyalty to family was everything to her, and that I so obviously cared deeply for Melissa meant that I was okay in her book.
A big, rough hand grasped mine in an ex-Marine grip. I squeezed back firmly, feeling the muscles in Mr. Argent’s fingers and knowing that anything less than an iron handshake invited his disfavor. Melissa’s father was tall and lean, his skin a reddish tan under hair crew cut and gray. His lined face was a souvenir of years of sun and rain from Vietnam through Desert Storm. Tonight he wore a red polo shirt and tan slacks, but I always thought of him in camouflage fatigues. I didn’t know his exact age, but once I made the mistake of joking that I could do more pushups than an old man, and this wiry soldier with a washboard belly matched me until my arms collapsed. He then did an extra twenty. He retired from the military to become an executive at a defense contractor, and then to the serenity of his garden. It was his reward for a lifetime of hard work, though he still arranged those flowers with the thoroughness of a rifle company at drill.
“Hello, Ken. You still taking good care of my daughter?” His deep, quiet voice maintained just a hint of the Tennessee hills. It contrasted dramatically with his wife’s patrician Massachusetts accent. Melissa claimed she had no accent because her parents cancelled each other out.
“I know what will happen to me if I don’t, Mr. Argent.” I was only half-joking and he only half-chuckled through the long-stemmed pipe protruding from his lips like a periscope rising from a sea of weeds. I had to remind myself not to call
him “Colonel.” His orders were that he had given and received enough salutes in the Corps, and he didn’t need his son-in-law doing it. On the other hand, he always was – and always would be – Mr. Argent to me. I just could never imagine calling this man “Dad.”
We only got a foot inside the door before we ran into a roadblock. Wolfgang, the hundred-pound Alsatian and Mr. Argent’s special pet, sprawled over half the living room floor. He wore the calm, sleepy face and languid eyes of an even-tempered animal. Yet his breed had been known to be vicious, and I took care to stay on his good side.
Melissa knelt on the floor and rubbed the dog’s flanks vigorously while he whimpered with delight.
The Argent home was larger than it appeared on the outside. Perhaps it was the relatively sparse furniture, as if the Colonel expected a call to ship out to Afghanistan tomorrow. Yet Melissa said her father turned down some plum overseas assignments at the end of his career so his family could stay in Washington and his kids could stay in one school district.
There were reminders of a life led on foreign shores. A carving of a camel stood on a bookcase. An Asian vase of deepest blue, emblazoned with ornate red and yellow flowers, sat on the fireplace mantle, which itself was etched in red, green, and gold. In the winter, it reflected the firelight as if the fire burned within.
We sat down punctually, as always, and ate roast beef, as always. Chicken would have been heresy, lamb an act of rebellion, and vegetarian cuisine the first salvo of a Communist invasion. My fiftieth roast beef meal here would have been tedious if I didn’t love roast beef and if Melissa’s mother was not such a good cook. I enjoyed two helpings of meat, earning a smile from Mrs. Argent and a grunt from the Colonel, who would likely get to his third before dinner was through. Melissa filled her plate with side dishes as she did every time we ate here. She gave up explaining vegetarianism to her parents after they failed to receive her vivid description of cruelty in slaughterhouses well. I think she still held out some hope of persuading me to become a vegetarian, but I think she also understood that her chances were slim. Yet she loved me still.
In this house, there was one commanding officer, and he sat at the head of the table and dictated the conversation. Tonight he expounded on the sexual innuendo and coarse language that pervaded the airwaves. We all nodded our heads, and I neglected to mention that I found shock jocks a guilty pleasure and even occasionally amusing. I did this more out of respect for Melissa and her mother than out of any sense of intimidation – no need to get into some unpleasant argument. Though, to be entirely honest, Mr. Argent did intimidate me a little.
We offered to help wash up after dinner, knowing that Melissa’s mother would insist we relax in the living room.
“You’re going to be spoiled from now until the wedding. You kids have enough to deal with.”
“Exactly,” her father said solemnly. “Enjoy it while you can. The hard work comes after the honeymoon.”
“Be quiet, Harold,” Mrs. Argent said. I don’t know whether he intimidated her or not. Certainly there were occasions when she got away with putting him in his place, which I found fun to see.
Melissa and I sat on the living room sofa and listened to the splash of water meeting cutlery in the kitchen sink. She leaned on my shoulder while I stroked her hair. “A good dinner,” I said, sighing. “In a nice house with nice furniture. When we buy a house, we’ll make a home like this.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
“We’ll need to get a lot more stuff than we have now, though. Maybe we’ll even get a piano to take up space.”
“I don’t want a piano, Ken.”
A warm, sweet smell floated out of the kitchen.
“Oh, yes,” I said eagerly. “Here come the gingerbread cookies.”
“If you keep eating like this, you won’t be hungry again until we leave Italy.”
“Don’t worry about my appetite. Besides, your mom loves when I make a pig of myself. And if the cookies are coming, that means it’s time for the next stage in this evening’s entertainment.”
“Ken, don’t tease her this time.”
Mrs. Argent really would be a TV character if she didn’t have any flaws. Some women were afflicted with the need to knit afghans that no one wanted. Melissa’s mom’s vice was photo albums. She had dozens and dozens of them. Her collection was as big as the Encyclopedia Britannica and just as enthralling to spend time with. It inundated the living room bookshelf with rows of black volumes.
Like everything else in the Argent household, this was a ritual as consistent as the phases of the moon. First came roast beef, then the smell of gingerbread baking, and then, invariably, the photos.
Melissa’s mom made wonderful cookies, but not even hot gingerbread compensates for the tedium of leafing through somebody else’s pictures. I liked seeing what Melissa looked like when she was a little girl, but we’d gotten to those pretty early in our relationship and had since moved on to volumes that didn’t include her at all. It’s bad enough when friends insist on showing them, and you have to feign interest in fuzzy shots of Rome or zoom-lens pictures of someone’s kids trashing a campground. But how do you tell your mother-in-law that her cherished memories are a bore? I flexed my lip muscles for a session of obligatory smiling.
Endurance was the key when Melissa and her mother got started on one of these little Kodak trysts (yes, Melissa actually seemed to like doing this). The Colonel always retreated after dinner, mumbling that he had to walk the dog, even if Wolfgang was sound asleep. Wolfgang’s leash was as wide as a vacuum cleaner hose, but I would rather have tried to restrain him than nod at the umpteenth snapshot of the Grand Canyon.
That we would look at photos was a certainty. However, I never knew which album Mrs. Argent was going to choose. Tonight she walked over to the bookshelf and paused, her forefinger fluttering over the rows of volumes. My mind locked onto her hand, willing it to follow my suggestion. Go for the book from your time in Cambodia – at least the art is interesting. For a moment, her forefinger hovered over one volume with a capital M carefully drawn in red ink. She put her hands on her hips and turned to us.
“You are not going to believe this, Melissa. Do you remember how we lost that album with your teenage pictures? Remember how upset I was? It’s the strangest thing, but I was clearing out the attic for the neighborhood garage sale next month. An old coin rolled behind the chimney in the corner. When I bent to pick it up, I found the album wedged in there. I can’t imagine how that happened. It must have fallen in when the roofers fixed the attic years ago.”
“You mean you have more pictures of Melissa?” I said, almost clapping.
Mrs. Argent beamed at my expression of interest. “Yes, Ken. I know how much you enjoyed her baby pictures and the scrapbook of her college days. But we haven’t seen these other pictures in nearly fifteen years. I almost forgot we had them.”
This was not going to be the same old evening after all. I found it absolutely fascinating to look at pictures of the early Melissa. It filled in the blanks for me. No matter how much we talked about our past – and admittedly it wasn’t much beyond the traditional old boyfriend/old girlfriend stuff – I found myself wanting to know more about her. This woman who meant so much to me had had decades of life before we met, and I wished I could have shared every minute of it with her. She was especially vague about her teenage years, disposing of any questions I had with dashed-off references to acne, braces, and unmanageable hair. Clearly it was an awkward period for her and she didn’t have any interest in revisiting it, but I know I would have loved Melissa even if she had a zit the size of Everest on her nose, and this new “discovery” from her mother was like striking the motherlode.
I turned to Melissa. Her head had withdrawn from my shoulder and her smile had faded. “Your mom found some more old photos of you.”
“I heard.”
“Where should we start
, dear?” Mrs. Argent said to me. “Do you want to look at the new album, or should we go back to Melissa’s baby album first?”
“Let’s start with the baby album,” I said enthusiastically. We might be here all night, but I did not want to miss one image. These weren’t lifeless stills of heartless mountains or ancient relatives. These were pictures of life itself.
Mrs. Argent plucked a binder from a shelf and sat beside me on the couch. She smoothed her skirt and opened the album. Inside the plastic sheaths were photos of different sizes. At the top were two small studio portraits of Melissa as a toddler, in a pink suit and showing the first twists of golden curls. In one picture, she held a little doll and in the other a stuffed lamb.
“It was a chore getting her to pose for that one,” Melissa’s mother said. “It took two lollipops. She was always such a good baby, but when she was determined not to do something, she didn’t do it. I’ll bet she’s still the same way.”
I grinned at Melissa. Her lips twitched in a half-smile, and she mumbled something. I shifted my attention back to the album. Melissa’s mother turned the pages. Now the girl in the picture was taller and darker-haired. She danced in a tutu, her face glowing with the same carefree energy that she’d had as a toddler. This was a child that loved life.
“Melissa used to be so exuberant,” her mother said proudly. She glanced thoughtfully at her daughter.
A short while later, Mrs. Argent retrieved a second album. The pictures changed, revealing a girl taller and more beautiful by the year. The first shot was of young Melissa walking along a stream, clad in one of those sleeveless winter jackets that resembled body armor.
“Melissa belonged to a student environmental group that cleaned up trash from wildlife preserves,” Mrs. Argent said. “Harold had difficulty understanding why young people worried so much about picking up soda cans. I explained to him that it was just like soldiers policing trash on the grounds of a military base. He always took extra care that his rifle company kept their bivouac spotless.”
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